I have some experience with Metal and quite a bit with Unity and am familiar with setting up meshes, buffers, and the backing data for drawing; but not so much the math/shader side. What I'm struggling with is how to get an endless scrolling world. So if I pan far to the right side I can see the left side and keep going.
The application of this would be a seamless terrain that a player could scroll in any direction forever and have it just wrap.
I don't want to duplicate everything on draw and offset it, that seems horrendously inefficient. I am hoping for a way to either use some magic matrix math or some sort of shader to get things wrapping/drawing where they should when panning the map. I've searched all over for some sort of guide or explanation of how to get this working but haven't come up with anything.
I know a lot of old (dos) games did this somehow, is it still possible? Is there a reason why it seems the industry has migrated away from this type of scrolling (bounding to edges vs wrapping)?
I have created a simple example demonstrating what you're looking for (I think).
The basic idea of it is that you draw the map in a repeating grid, using the drawPrimitives(type:vertexStart:vertexCount:instanceCount:) method on MTLRenderCommandEncoder. As the instance count you want to pass in the number of identical maps you want to draw, extending it as far as needed to not see where it ends. In my example I used a simple 5x5 grid.
To not have the user see the edge of the map, we're gonna calculate their position modulo 1 (or whatever size your map is):
func didDrag(dx: CGFloat, dy: CGFloat) {
// Move user position on drag, adding 1 to not get below 0
x += Float(dx) * draggingSpeed + 1
z += Float(dy) * draggingSpeed + 1
x.formTruncatingRemainder(dividingBy: 1)
z.formTruncatingRemainder(dividingBy: 1)
}
This is how it looks:
Just a follow up on what I have actually implemented. First I essentially have an array of x,y points with altitude, terrain type and all that jazz. Using some simple % and additions/subtractions it is trivial to get the nodes around a point to generate triangles
On a draw I calculate the first showing point and the last showing point and calculate the groups of triangles shown between those points. The first/last point take into account wrapping, it is then pretty trivial to have an endless wrapping world. For each group a translation offset is passed via a uniform matrix for that group which will position that section where it should belong.
I set it via renderEncoder.setVertexBytes(&uniform, length:..., offset:...)
Related
I am trying to make a new tool for the tabletop simulator community based on my "pack up bag". The Packup Bag is a tool that remembers world position and rotation of objects you place inside it, so you can then place them back in the same positions and rotations they came from when "unpacking the bag".
I have been trying to modify this so it spits things out in a relative position and rotation to the bag, instead of using hardcoded world coordinates. The idea here is that players can sit at any location at the table, pick the faction bag they wish to play.. drop it on a known spot marked for them and press the place and it will populate contents of the bag relative to its location.
Now I have gotten some of this worked out... I am able to get the bag to place relative in some ways .. but I am finding it beyond my maths skills to work out the modifications of the transforms.
Basically I have this part working..
The mod understands relative position to the bag
The mod understands relative rotation to the bag
BUT.. the mod dose not understand relative position AND rotation at the same time.... I need someway to modify the position data relative to the rotational data... but can not work out how.
See this video....
https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cFiOeYFsyi
As you can see as I move the bag around the object is placed relative to it.... but if I rotate the bag, the object has the correct rotation but I need math to work out the correct position IF it is rotated. You can see it is just getting placed in the same position it was as if there was no rotation... as I haven't worked out how to code it to do this.
Now I have heard of something called "matrix math" but I couldn't understand it. I'm a self taught programmer of only a few months after I started modding TTS.
You can kinda understand what I mean I hope.. In the video example, when I rotate the bag, the object should be placed with the correct rotation but the world position needs to be changed.
See this Example to see relative rotation ....
https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cFiOeZFsyq
My code dose this by remembering the self.getPostion() of the bag and the obj.Position() of the object getting packed up.. it then dose a self - obj and stores that value for the X and Y position. It also remembers if it is negative or position and then when placing it uses the self.postion() and adds or subtracts the adjustment value. Same for rotation.
Still I do not know what ot go from here.. I have been kinda hurting my head on this and thought maybe some of you math guys might have a better idea on how to do this.
: TL;DR :
So I have
bag.getPosition() and obj.getRotation()
bag.getRotation(0 and obj.getRotation()
These return (x,y,z}
What math can I use to find the relative position and rotation of the objects to the bag so if I rotate the bag. The objects come out of it in a relative way...
Preferably in LUA.. thank you!
I'd hope you've found the answer by now, but for anyone else finding this page:
The problem is much simpler than what you're suggesting - it's basic right triangle trigonometry.
Refer to this diagram. You have a right triangle with points A, B, and C, where C is the right angle. (For brevity, I'll use abbreviations opp, adj, and hyp.) The bag is at point A, you want the object at point B. You have the angle and distance (angle A and the length of the hyp, respectively), but you need the x,y coordinates of point B relative to point A.
The x coord is the length of adj, and y coord is the length of opp. As shown, the formulas to calculate these are:
cos(angle A) = adj/hyp
sin(angle A) = opp/hyp
solving for the unknowns:
adj = hyp * cos(angle A)
opp = hyp * sin(angle A)
For your specific use, and taking into account the shift in coordinate system x,y,z => x,z,y:
obj_x_offset = distance * math.cos(bag.getRotation().y)
obj_z_offset = distance * math.sin(bag.getRotation().y)
obj_x_position = bag.getPosition().x + obj_x_offset
obj_z_position = bag.getPosition().z + obj_z_offset
Diagram source:
https://www.khanacademy.org/math/geometry/hs-geo-trig/hs-geo-modeling-with-right-triangles/a/right-triangle-trigonometry-review
While using Delphi Seattle 10 and Steema TeeChart Pro VCL FMX 2016.18, I am looking to Highlight a Selection of a Line Graph (multiple series) in the way that Zooming allows / makes a square around a highlighted selection of a Line Graph to indicate which part of it to zoom into (as long as the onmousedown action is in progress).
The purpose of this would be to allow the selection to remain highlighted while the mouse is no longer being clicked, to potentially "Delete" the highlighted Data points. All I need this for is to obtain the (X0 Y0 X1 Y1) values to possibly obtain the CalcPosPoint(X) and remove all the points inside. The data is currently obtained through a Record Struct (Memory Mapped) file, and it will there for be used to set/check for a property "deleted" to indicate on the next redraw of the graph which rows to completely ignore and which to continue printing.
I hope to be able to do this (select from 1 chart), and have it simultaneously draw on multiple graphs. I have tried to look for an example of this feature through the use of TSelectorTool (FMXTee). One of the pages I found referring to such a tool is Interactive data point selection as well as Multiple selections with Selector Tool
And my second question has to do with TeeCharts directly. Where would I find fmx240.bpl as TeeChart_Pro_Firemonkey_Demo.exe requires this file in order to run? I did manage to copy vcl240.bpl from "Embarcadero\Studio\18.0\bin" and put it into "Embarcadero\Studio\17.0\bin"
[Edited]
I have managed to capture / create a sample code (MVCE) from which I can now select a portion and create a square around a particular sample of graph lines.
The control graph right now is the bottom graph (Chart5). If anyone is interested in seeing the code, I have put up a pastebin sample.
PasteBin Sample Code
And a TeeCharts.tar.gz is accessible to anyone who wishes to see a sample of the code, as well as the data sample.
filetolink.com Source Files
I no longer feel the need for mathematical equation to differentiate the top graphs from the bottom (because the bottom axes are automatic where as the top are defined). I intend to only use the space which is adherent to the visible space, and do not intend to extend in either direction (left or right). That means at this point the size of the graph does not matter, because once I over populate the charts above, the position in the bottom graph would become irrelevant, and therefor I do not intend to use the bottom chart.
The next step is to save the positions of the boxes so that they can reappear when the graph is shift from left (past data) to the right (live data). And then uses the buttons above to make the appropriate action to the graphs.
I would like to know what way would be the most sufficient way to record the positions of the rectangles, so when the chart is shifted (via the ScrollBar1), the rectangles are moving with the direction of the scrollbar. But I'm sure I can achieve that.
I think I have found a solution. The red squares are only prevalent for the visual aspect, they can be drawn on, I don't need to do anything special with each chart, as I already know what the X0..Y1 parameters are, they are known from the initial chart. The problem h/e has to do with the initial chart. As long as the screens are all full, I can zoom in correctly w/ alignment with on all the charts (ZoomRect/Rectf(X0..Y1))
But what kind of equation would it take to adjust the charts that are not in the same zoom / max / min when the Chart5.Axes.Bottom.Automatic = True?
From there I just simply have to disable the immediate zoom feature, and allow buttons to become functional, to decide what the next course of action would be.
I am currently working on an algorithm to detect the playing area of a pool table. For this purpose, I captured an image, transformed it to grayscale, and used a Sobel operator on it. Now I want to detect the playing area as a box with 4 corners located in the 4 corners of the table.
Detecting the edges of the table is quite straightforward, however, it turns out that detecting the 4 corners is not so easy, as there are pockets in the pool table. Now I just want to fit a line to each of the side edges, and from those lines, I can compute the intersects, which are the corners for my table.
I am stuck here, because I could not yet come up with a good solution to find these lines in my image. I can see it very easily when I used the Sobel operator. But what would be a good way of detecting it and computing the position of the corners?
EDIT: I added some sample Images
Basic Image:
Grayscale Image
Sobel Filter (horizontal only)
For a general solution, there will be many sources of noise: problems with cloth around the rails, wood texture (or no texture) on the rails, varying lighting, shadows, stains on the cloth, chalk on the rails, and so on.
When color and lighting aren't dependable, and when you want to find the edges of geometric objects, then it's best to think in terms of edge pixels rather than gray/color pixels.
A while back I was thinking of making a phone-based app to save ball positions for later review, including online, so I've though a bit about this problem. Although I can provide some guidance for your current question, it occurs to me you'll run into new problems each step of the way, so I'll try to provide a more complete answer.
Convert the image to grayscale. If we can't get an algorithm to work in grayscale, we'll inevitably run into problems with color. (See below)
[TBD] Do some preprocessing to reduce noise.
Find edge points using Sobel or (if you must) Canny.
Run Hough lines detection, but with a few caveats and parameterizations as described below.
Find the lines described a keystone-shaped quadrilateral. (This will likely be the inner quadrilateral of two: one inside the rail on the bed, and the other slightly larger quadrilateral at the cloth/wood rail edge at top.)
(Optional) Use the side pockets to help determine the orientation of the quadrilateral.
Use an affine transform to map the perspective-distorted table bed to a rectangle of [thankfully] known relative dimensions. We know the bed sizes in advance, so you can remap the distorted rectangle to a proper rectangle. (We'll ignore some optical effects for now.)
Remap the color image to the perspective-corrected rectangle. You'll probably need to tweak the positions of some balls.
General notes:
Filtering by color in the general sense can be difficult. It's tempting to think of the cloth as being simply green, blue, or red (or some other color), but when you look at the actual RGB values and try to separate colors you'll begin to appreciate what a nightmare working in color can be.
Optical distortion might throw off some edges.
The far short rail may be difficult to detect, BUT you do this: find the inside lines for the two long rails, then search vertically between the two rails for the first strong horizontal-ish edge at the far side of the image. That'll be the far short rail.
Although you probably want to use your phone camera for convenience, using a Kinect camera or similar (preferably smaller) device would make the problem easier. Not only would you have both color data and 3D data, but you would eliminate some problems with lighting since the depth data wouldn't depend on visible lighting.
For your app, consider limiting the search region for rail edges to a perspective-distorted rectangle. The user might be able to adjust the search region. This could greatly simplify the processing, and could help you work around problems if the table isn't lit well (as can be the case).
If color segmentation (as suggested by #Dima) works, get the outline of the blob using contour following. Then simplify the outline to a quadrilateral (or a polygon of few sides) by the Douglas-Peucker algorithm. You should find the four table edges this way.
For more accuracy, you can refine the edge location by local search of transitions across it and perform line fitting. Then intersect the lines to get the corners.
The following answer assumes you have already found the positions of the lines in the image. This however can be done "easily" by directly looking at the pixels and seeing if they are in a "line". Usually it is easier to detect this if the image has been deskewed first as well, i.e. Rotated so the rectangle (pool table) is more like this: [] than like /=/. Then it is just a case of scanning the pixels and if there are ones of similar colour alongside it assuming a line is between them.
The code works by looping over the lines found in the image. Whenever the end points of each line falls within a tolerance on within the x and y coordinates it is marked as a corner. Once the corners are found I take the average value between them to find where the corner lies. For example:
A horizontal line ending at 10, 10 and a vertical line starting at 12, 12 will be found to be a corner if there is a tolerance of 2 or more. The corner found will be at: 11, 11
NOTE: This is just to find Top Left corners but can easily be adapted to find all of them. The reason it has been done like this is because in the application where I use it, it is faster to sort each array first into an order where relevant values will be found first, see: Why is processing a sorted array faster than an unsorted array?.
Also note that my code finds the first corner for each line which might not be applicable for you, this is mainly for performance reasons. However the code can easily be adapted to find all the corners with all the lines then either select the "more likely" corner or average through them all.
Also note my answer is written in C#.
private IEnumerable<Point> FindTopLeftCorners(IEnumerable<Line> horizontalLines, IEnumerable<Line> verticalLines)
{
List<Point> TopLeftCorners = new List<Point>();
Line[] laHorizontalLines = horizontalLines.OrderBy(l => l.StartPoint.X).ThenBy(l => l.StartPoint.Y).ToArray();
Line[] laVerticalLines = verticalLines.OrderBy(l => l.StartPoint.X).ThenBy(l => l.StartPoint.Y).ToArray();
foreach (Line verticalLine in laVerticalLines)
{
foreach (Line horizontalLine in laHorizontalLines)
{
if (verticalLine.StartPoint.X <= (horizontalLine.StartPoint.X + _nCornerTolerance) && verticalLine.StartPoint.X >= (horizontalLine.StartPoint.X - _nCornerTolerance))
{
if (horizontalLine.StartPoint.Y <= (verticalLine.StartPoint.Y + _nCornerTolerance) && horizontalLine.StartPoint.Y >= (verticalLine.StartPoint.Y - _nCornerTolerance))
{
int nX = (verticalLine.StartPoint.X + horizontalLine.StartPoint.X) / 2;
int nY = (verticalLine.StartPoint.Y + horizontalLine.StartPoint.Y) / 2;
TopLeftCorners.Add(new Point(nX, nY));
break;
}
}
}
}
return TopLeftCorners;
}
Where Line is the following class:
public class Line
{
public Point StartPoint { get; private set; }
public Point EndPoint { get; private set; }
public Line(Point startPoint, Point endPoint)
{
this.StartPoint = startPoint;
this.EndPoint = endPoint;
}
}
And _nCornerTolerance is an int of a configurable amount.
A playing area of a pool table typically has a distinctive color, like green or blue. I would try a color-based segmentation approach first. The Color Thresholder app in MATLAB gives you an easy way to try different color spaces and thresholds.
The problem is simple: I want to move (and later, be able to rotate) an image. For example, every time i press the right arrow on my keyboard, i want the image to move 0.12 pixels to the right, and every time i press the left arrow key, i want the image to move 0.12 pixels to the left.
Now, I have multiple solutions for this:
1) simply add the incremental value, i.e.:
image.x += 0.12;
this is of course assuming that we're going to the right.
2) i multiplicate the value of a single increment by the times i already went into this particular direction + 1, like this:
var result:Number = 0.12 * (numberOfTimesWentRight+1);
image.x = result;
Both of these approaches work but produce similiar, yet subtly different, results. If we add some kind of button component that simply resets the x and y coordinates of the image, you will see that with the first approach the numbers don't add up correctly.
it goes from .12, .24, .359999, .475 etc.
But with the second approach it works well. (It's pretty obvious as to why though, it seems like += operations with Numbers are not really precise).
Why not use the second approach then? Well, i want to rotate the image as well. This will work for the first attempt, but after that the image will jump around. Why? In the second approach we never took the original position of the image in account. So if the origin-point shifts a bit down or up because you rotated your image, and THEN you try to move the image again: it will move to the same position as if you hadn't rotated before.
Alright, to make this short:
How can i reliably move, scale and rotate images for 1/10 of a pixel?
Short answer: I don't know! You're fighting with floating point math!
Luckily, I have a workaround, if you don't mind.
You store the location (x and y) of the image in a separate variable... at a larger scale. Such as 100x. So 123.45 becomes 12345, and you then divide by 100 to set the attribute that flash uses to display.
Yes, there are limits to number sizes too, but if you're willing to accept some error rate, and the fact that you'll be limited to, I dunno, a million pixels in each direction, you can fit it in a regular int. The only rounding error you will encounter will be a single rounding error when you divide by 100 (or the factor you used). So instead of the compound rounding error which you described (0.12 * 4 = 0.475), you should see things like 0.47999999. Which doesn't matter because it's, well, so small.
To expand on #Pimgd answer a bit, you're probably hitting a floating point error (multiple +='s will exaggerate the error more than one *='s) - Numbers in Flash are 53-bit precision.
There's also another thing to keep in mind, which is probably playing a bigger role with such small movement values; Flash positions all objects using twips, which is roughly about 1/20th of a pixel, or 0.05, so all values are rounded to this. When you say image.x += 0.12, it's actually the equivalent of image.x += 0.10, hence which the different becomes apparent; you're losing 0.02 of a pixel with every move.
You should be able to get around it by moving to another scale, as #Pimgd says, or just storing your position separately - i.e. work from a property _x rather than image.x so you're not losing that precision everytime:
this._x += 0.12;
image.x = this._x;
How to make a 2d world with fixed size, which would repeat itself when reached any side of the map?
When you reach a side of a map you see the opposite side of the map which merged togeather with this one. The idea is that if you didn't have a minimap you would not even notice the transition of map repeating itself.
I have a few ideas how to make it:
1) Keeping total of 3x3 world like these all the time which are exactly the same and updated the same way, just the players exists in only one of them.
2) Another way would be to seperate the map into smaller peaces and add them to required place when asked.
Either way it can be complicated to complete it. I remember that more thatn 10 years ago i played some game like that with soldiers following each other in a repeating wold shooting other AI soldiers.
Mostly waned to hear your thoughts about the idea and how it could be achieved. I'm coding in XNA(C#).
Another alternative is to generate noise using libnoise libraries. The beauty of this is that you can generate noise over a theoretical infinite amount of space.
Take a look at the following:
http://libnoise.sourceforge.net/tutorials/tutorial3.html#tile
There is also an XNA port of the above at: http://bigblackblock.com/tools/libnoisexna
If you end up using the XNA port, you can do something like this:
Perlin perlin = new Perlin();
perlin.Frequency = 0.5f; //height
perlin.Lacunarity = 2f; //frequency increase between octaves
perlin.OctaveCount = 5; //Number of passes
perlin.Persistence = 0.45f; //
perlin.Quality = QualityMode.High;
perlin.Seed = 8;
//Create our 2d map
Noise2D _map = new Noise2D(CHUNKSIZE_WIDTH, CHUNKSIZE_HEIGHT, perlin);
//Get a section
_map.GeneratePlanar(left, right, top, down);
GeneratePlanar is the function to call to get the sections in each direction that will connect seamlessly with the rest of your world.
If the game is tile based I think what you should do is:
Keep only one array for the game area.
Determine the visible area using modulo arithmetics over the size of the game area mod w and h where these are the width and height of the table.
E.g. if the table is 80x100 (0,0) top left coordinates with a width of 80 and height of 100 and the rect of the viewport is at (70,90) with a width of 40 and height of 20 you index with [70-79][0-29] for the x coordinate and [90-99][0-9] for the y. This can be achieved by calculating the index with the following formula:
idx = (n+i)%80 (or%100) where n is the top coordinate(x or y) for the rect and i is in the range for the width/height of the viewport.
This assumes that one step of movement moves the camera with non fractional coordinates.
So this is your second alternative in a little bit more detailed way. If you only want to repeat the terrain, you should separate the contents of the tile. In this case the contents will most likely be generated on the fly since you don't store them.
Hope this helped.